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Nowhere to use Japan's growing plutonium stockpile

Published on NewsOK
Modified: December 28, 2012 at 3:58 am •
Published: December 28, 2012

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ROKKASHO, Japan (AP) — How is an atomic-powered island nation riddled with fault lines supposed to handle its nuclear waste? Part of the answer was supposed to come from this windswept village along Japan's northern coast.

In this Nov. 7, 2012 photo, farmer Keiko Kikukawa walks through her field where she just finished harvesting organic-grown rhubarbs in Rokasho village, Aomori Prefecture, northern Japan. By hosting a high-tech facility that would convert spent fuel into a plutonium-uranium mix designed for the next generation of reactors, Rokkasho was supposed to provide fuel while minimizing nuclear waste storage problems. Those ambitions are falling apart because years of attempts to build a “fast breeder” reactor, which would use the reprocessed fuel, appear to be ending in failure. "It's so unfair that Rokkasho is stuck with the nuclear garbage from all over Japan," Kikukawa said. "And it's not going to go away even if the Rokkasho plant stops immediately. We're dumping it all onto our offsprings to take care of. It's so irresponsible." (AP Photo/Koji Sasahara)

By hosting a high-tech facility that would convert spent fuel into a plutonium-uranium mix designed for the next generation of reactors, Rokkasho was supposed to provide fuel while minimizing nuclear waste storage problems. Those ambitions are falling apart because years of attempts to build a "fast breeder" reactor, which would use the reprocessed fuel, appear to be ending in failure.

But Japan still intends to reprocess spent fuel at Rokkasho. It sees few other options, even though it will mean extracting plutonium that could be used to make nuclear weapons.

If the country were to close the reprocessing plant, some 3,000 tons of spent waste piling up here would have to go back to the nuclear plants that made it, and those already are running low on storage space. There is scant prospect for building a long-term nuclear waste disposal site in Japan.

So work continues at Rokkasho, where the reprocessing unit remains in testing despite being more than 30 years in the making, and the plant that would produce plutonium-uranium fuel remains under construction. The Associated Press was recently granted a rare and exclusive tour of the plant, where spent fuel rods lie submerged in water in a gigantic, dimly lit pool.

The effort continues on the assumption that the plutonium Japan has produced — 45 tons so far — will be used in reactors, even though that is not close to happening to a significant degree.

In nearby Oma, construction is set to resume on an advanced reactor that is not a fast-breeder but can use more plutonium than conventional reactors. Its construction, begun in 2008 for planned operation in 2014, has been suspended since the March 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdowns, and could face further delays as Japan's new nuclear watchdog prepares new safety guidelines.

If Japan decided that it cannot use the plutonium, it would be breaking international pledges aimed at preventing the spread of weapons-grade nuclear material. It already has enough plutonium to make hundreds of nuclear bombs — 10 tons of it at home and the rest in Britain and France, where Japan's spent fuel was previously processed.

Countries such as the U.S. and Britain have similar problems with nuclear waste storage, but Japan's population density and seismic activity, combined with the 2011 Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear disaster, make its situation more untenable in the eyes of the nation's nuclear-energy opponents. Some compare it to building an apartment without a toilet.

"Our nuclear policy was a fiction," former National Policy Minister Seiji Maehara told a parliamentary panel in November. "We have been aware of the two crucial problems. One is a fuel cycle: A fast-breeder is not ready. The other is the back-end (waste disposal) issue. They had never been resolved, but we pushed for the nuclear programs anyway."

Nuclear power is likely to be part of Japan for some time to come, even though just two of its 50 functioning reactors are operating and Japan recently pledged to phase out nuclear power by the 2030s. That pledge was made by a government that was trounced in elections Dec. 16, and the now-ruling Liberal Democratic Party was the force that brought atomic power to Japan to begin with.

Liberal Democrats have said they will spend the next 10 years figuring out the best energy mix, effectively freezing a nuclear phase-out. Japan's new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, said he may reconsider the previous government's decision not to build more reactors.

Construction at Rokkasho's reprocessing plant started in 1993 and that unit alone has cost 2.2 trillion yen ($27 billion) so far. Rokkasho's operational cost through 2060 would be a massive 43 trillion yen ($500 billion), according to a recent government estimate.

The reprocessing facility at this extremely high-security plant is designed to extract uranium and plutonium from spent fuel to fabricate MOX — mixed oxide fuel, a mix of the two radioactive elements. The MOX fabrication plant is set to open in 2016.

Conventional light-water reactors use uranium and produce some plutonium during fission. Reprocessing creates an opportunity to reuse the spent fuel rather than storing it as waste, but the stockpiling of plutonium produced in the process raises concerns about nuclear proliferation.

Fast-breeder reactors are supposed to solve part of that problem. They run on both uranium and plutonium, and they can produce more fuel than they consume because they convert uranium isotopes that do not fission readily into plutonium. Several countries have developed or are building them, but none has succeeded in building one for commercial use. The United States, France and Germany have abandoned plans due to cost and safety concerns.

The prototype Monju fast-breeder reactor in western Japan had been in the works for nearly 50 years, but after repeated problems, authorities this summer pulled the plug, deeming the project unworkable and unsafe.

Monju successfully generated power using MOX in 1995, but months later, massive leakage of cooling sodium caused a fire. Monju had another test run in 2010 but stopped again after a fuel exchanger fell into the reactor vessel.